"Football is a part of our culture and football fields form part of our landscape. There are proportionately more grounds in Holland then in any other country in the world."—Hans van der Meer

In conjunction with the exhibition, Nature as Artifice: New Dutch Landscape in Photography and Video Art, on view at Aperture Gallery and coinciding with the four-hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Henry Hudson to New York Harbor aboard the Dutch vessel Halve Maen, Aperture is pleased to offer our collecting audience this very special limited-edition photograph by Dutch photographer Hans van der Meer.

Aartswoud is from Van der Meer's well known and highly collected Dutch Fields series; it is also the cover image for his book Hollandse Velden, which was highlighted in Gerry Badger and Martin Parr's The Photobook: A History Volume 1. Much of Van der Meer's work deals with the observation and exploration of urban space and landscape in projects focusing on urban development in the Netherlands.

In Dutch Fields, work that is ostensibly about football, the artist made photographs of low-division amateur football games, looking for football in its original form as it was played more than a hundred years ago: on a piece of land, with twenty-two players, and without spectators. Here the artist strived to make pictures where he could combine the field, the players, and an interesting landscape in the background. As he states, "I needed the world outside of the field to show literally that football is part of our culture." The artist focused on fields that "popped up" in the landscape more or less spontaneously and where the importance of football was palpable. Once he found a spot to make a photograph, he picked a viewpoint where he could frame the landscape and record the choreography of the players entering his frame.

The photographs from this series were exhibited first during the 1998 World Cup at the Instituut in Rotterdam and then later at Kyoto National Museum, Japan, 2000; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2001; Centro Português de Fotografia, Porto, 2004; and Les Rencontres d'Arles, France, 2004.

Hans van der Meer was born in 1955 in Leimuiden, The Netherlands. He has published numerous books of his own photographs and of archival images. His work is included in major international collections and he has had solo exhibitions in venues such as the National Media Museum, Bradford, England; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Centro Portugûes de Fotografia, Porto; National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan. The first retrospective of his work was recently shown at the Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam, concluding in August 2009. He is a contributing editor at Useful Photography.